معرفی
Laura Dietz is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Hampshire, where she leads the TREMA lab. Her academic journey began with a PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbruecken, Germany (2011), followed by postdoctoral positions at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2010-2015) and University of Mannheim (2015-2016).
Her educational background includes PhD studies at both the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (2007-2011) under Prof. Gerhard Weikum and Prof. Tobias Scheffer, and earlier research at Humboldt University in Berlin. She has built a distinguished career bridging theoretical computer science with practical applications in information retrieval and machine learning.
Dietz's research primarily focuses on the intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing, and knowledge graphs, with a parallel research initiative in watershed data science. She is particularly known for her work on entity-aspect linking, complex answer retrieval, and the vision of automatic Wikipedia construction. Her approach integrates fine-grained knowledge annotations with text understanding to create comprehensive information systems that go beyond traditional 10-blue-links search paradigms. In watershed data science, she applies similar machine learning techniques to environmental data streams, focusing on solute transport analysis during storm events.
Her recent publications reveal a strong trend toward fine-grained semantic understanding, particularly in entity-oriented search tasks. She has pioneered methods for entity-aspect linking that significantly improve retrieval accuracy by capturing different contexts in which entities appear. Her work increasingly integrates knowledge graphs with neural architectures, showing sophisticated understanding of how to leverage both structured and unstructured information for better search experiences.
- Best paper award at JCDL 2018 for work on entity-aspect linking
- NSF CAREER Award (2019-2023) for "Utilizing Fine-grained Knowledge Annotations in Text Understanding and Retrieval"
- OSSI Award 2013 from UMass ICB3 for open-source hardware/software
Dietz actively mentors PhD and Masters students through the TREMA lab, with current research focusing on entity ranking, topic extraction, conversational search, and watershed forecasting. Her grant portfolio includes the NSF CAREER award and funding from the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub for forecasting salinity in rivers during storm events. She has also coordinated the TREC Complex Answer Retrieval track (2017-2019), creating important benchmarks for the IR community.
The TREMA lab (Text Retrieval, Entity Modeling, and Applications) serves as the hub for Dietz's research activities, bringing together students and collaborators to work on cutting-edge problems in information access. The lab's work spans both theoretical contributions to information retrieval and practical applications in domains ranging from environmental science to scientific publication analysis.
